Perch @perchingpath@eldritch.cafe

Gayfeather, colic-root, rattlesnake-master, blazing star,( devil's bite, Cahaba torch, prairie-pine,) I took your list to that fireworks store in Upland, gathered & checked off each rocket, then imagined how you'd stare at a forest fire (guilty? gleeful?) as I put them all back.

I've bought my ticket for Witching and Immortal Bird in advance to give myself a deadline for snapping out of this disintegrative burst. In three days I have to cohere enough to stand in that crowd of black t-shirts and not feel like a... rotting scarecrow full of mice?

Repainting selfies. (Trying to catch it again.)

I don't even use mirrors anymore, I just hold up a stone head & shift my sensorium into it so I can check my hair from a perspective of lithic placidity.

Dreamed a long performance piece (at least an hour, unfinished when I woke) involving a man plagued by verminous spirits (fur on strings) & the reassembly of a humanoid stag's antlers (painted pvc slotting together). Why is my sleeping mind subject to these budgetary limitations.

https://malloryfolk.bandcamp.com/track/light-on-the-hill

Just slept over 9 hours after 9 insomniac days.
Dreamt I moved to a new city & was adopted by a spirit of loss, who barricaded the door behind which I'd left my bag of all worldly possessions but relented and vanished the moldering wood & rusting nails after tasting my distress.

Met by raptorous applause following your intensely vulnerable performance in the role of field mouse #31683.

Until quite recently I harbored an intractable unvoiced doubt as to whether lust was really something that could be felt bodily. I half-believed that was solely a social gloss to avoid thinking too hard about affection, power, & loneliness.

Main Line people only think it's dangerous over here because neighborhoods getting less white feels like a threat to them.
Sure, our town cops hounded a schizophrenic man for days then engineered a confrontation to cast murdering him as self-defense, but that'll happen anywhere.

The glare through St. Louis Lambert's glass walls will set us off again and she'll be inconsolable, trailing blind & weepy after the whir of my suitcase wheels while we look for our connection gate.

This portion of insomnia is tense, numbed, & paralyzed, like waiting in an airport. Not alone, which can be nice when it's not obligation that's sent you traveling, but with a fragile child. How long will she be occupied by her crosswords? What here is safest to feed her?

The iterative declassification of French nuclear test records will eventually reveal a tiny bomb was set off under my bed while I was out.

A portable blacklight may be used when picking herbs in the dark, to avoid the taking on of passengers.

I walked north into a neighborhood I'd been avoiding. The pareidolic faces that appear on the side walls of their defunct bars are uncommonly poignant.

One comfort of fall can be living in an aftermath untethered from any specific catastrophe.

A slowish night by headcount, with a few too many cops & "scary clowns". A child lost their mustache in the leaves.
But the clouds were racing and the wooden chimes were rattling over distant shrieks and just as we hit midnight the cold blew in all at once.

Partway through rubbing off a mouth of navy lipstick, a mess like you'd caught me in the embrace of a Smith Corona Four just as they'd slipped me the ribbon.

My favorite maple, four days apart. I was worried its leaves would fall green & early after our bone-dry August & September, but it's held to its festive schedule.

Hanging a single tropical leaf above my pillow to fool myself into thinking I'm a racket-tailed roller when I wake. Come morning I expect I'll be halfway through a cricket breakfast & shocked to find I have teeth.